It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for Nick Clegg. He’s a decent man who took a tough decision to put his party into coalition with the Conservatives, and lost half of his support as a result. Tomorrow, his party will be hammered. His great miscalculation was imagining that in England the Lib Dems would emerge with a list of achievements voters would applaud – as they did in the 2003 Holyrood elections when, after four years of coalition, the Lib Dems overtook the Scottish Conservatives to become the third-largest party.
On the radio the other day Clegg vainly paraded his boast list, his own version of Kelly Clarkson’s Because of You.
‘It’s because of us that 27 million people have received huge tax cuts. It’s because of us there’s been the biggest expansion of apprenticeships in a generation. It’s because of us that we’ve had the biggest liberal reform of the pension system, ending the discrimination against women in the pension system for generations.
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